Adventure
It might appear that adventure games are a subgenre of action adventure (or vice versa) because both involve exploration and item collection. However, where action adventure games populate their worlds with enemies, adventure games use puzzles, and that proves to be a game-changer. In adventure games, the fobs you collect are used to solve the puzzles, so if you don’t have the right stuff, you can’t really play the game. So genre entries end up being more about scouring the environment for any interactive item, no matter how small, and then puzzling over the random debris in your pockets (in case it’s not intuitively obvious to you that the best way to traverse a zip line is using a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle).
Notable examples
• The Curse of Monkey Island
• Day of the Tentacle
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Brawler
Brawlers are a pure expression of melee. In the early days, you could identify the genre by the presence of two high school boys punching their way through gangland to recover a lost girlfriend. The genre has diversified since then, but the core mechanics remain the same: start at point A and brutalize everyone on your way to point B. Brawlers are distinguished from action adventure games by less frequent puzzles and more detailed combat mechanics. These games are typically built for challenge, and tend to be fairly brief.
Notable examples
• Double Dragon
• Castle Crashers
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
Driving
Driving games run the gamut from realistic simulations to cartoony mascot racers, but their common mechanic of piloting a vehicle has been enough to spawn an entire gaming genre. The gameplay has expanded over the years from simple racing to include combat and exploration, but games in this vein tend away from simulation.
Notable examples
• Gran Turismo
• Super Mario Kart
• Carmageddon
Fighting
Fighting games feature still richer combat systems than even brawlers, but at the expense of exploration. The typical fighting game pits two opponents against each other in a best two-out-of-three knockout contest. Due to the detailed combat systems, the genre is known for the arcane button combinations that drive the combat, and the learning curve for precision command input represents a barrier to entry for many gamers. However, the one-on-one combat and the correspondence between skill and victory suit the genre to competitive multiplayer.
Notable examples
• Mortal Kombat
• Street Fighter II
• Tekken 3
Platformer
Just like brawlers emphasize combat, platformers emphasize motion by paying special attention to the physics of movement or by developing a deep system of movement mechanics. Platforming games typically place environmental obstacles and enemies to prevent players from reaching a destination. However, it’s not mandatory to attack enemies in platformers, and the agency mechanics in the game are generally built to enable obstacle avoidance. The genre is so named because players progress by jumping from platform to platform as they advance toward the goal.
Notable examples
• New Super Mario Bros.
• Braid
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
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[...] adventure. I noted that the genre boundary between adventure and action adventure games is blurry a while back, but Parish is talking about how The Legend of Zelda amounts to a graphical front end for a classic [...]